TRAITOR'S SUN.

A Novel of Darkover.

MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY.

PROLOGUE.

Herm Aldaran snapped awake, his heart pounding and sweat streaming down his chest. He gasped for air and struggled to push aside the bedclothes, his head throbbing. He sat there, blinking in the faint light that came from the common room of the small apartment, and swallowed hard. His dry mouth tasted like iron filings and his feet felt alien and disconnected from his body. Though his nightrobe was almost drenched around his broad chest, part of the sleeve was still dry enough to use to wipe the moisture off his face. As Herm stood up, the room spun, and he nearly sat down again.

At last his body stopped shaking, and his heart slowed to a more normal rhythm. He glanced at Katherine, his wife of more than a decade, still undisturbed by his movements. In the dim light Herm could see her dark hair spread across the pillow, and the sweep of her brow below it, the curve of her mouth beneath the strong nose. Not for the first time he wondered why such a beautiful woman had consented to marry a plain fellow like himself. It was a puzzle, but he knew it was not because he was wealthy-he was not-or had the ambiguous honor of being the Senator from Cottman IV, as the Terran Federation designated Darkover, the world of his birth. He gazed at her, letting his mind wander a bit, and felt himself settle into relative calm.

Herm realized he would not be able to go back to sleep anytime soon, so he rose and left the bedroom as quietly as possible, careful not to rouse Katherine. He peeped around the thin partition that separated their sleeping quarters from those of their two children and found them undisturbed. Then he padded across the dingy tiles in the small food preparation station and opened the cool cabinet. The carafe of juice was cold in his fingers, and he had a desire to drink right out of the lip of it. Until he held it, he had not realized he was still trembling slightly. He forced himself to find a glass, and poured some of the yellow liquid into it. Then he gulped down half the glass, letting the tart flavor of the juice wash away the nasty taste on his tongue. The cold liquid hit his belly like a blow, and for a moment he felt as if he had swallowed acid. Then the dreadful sensation vanished, although his stomach continued to protest for several seconds. He knew it was only an illusion, but he had the feeling that he could sense the sugar in the juice entering his bloodstream. His breathing deepened, and he shivered all over, chilled where he had been burning only a few moments earlier.

Herm sank down onto one of the stools that stood beside the long counter which served as the eating area, put the glass down before he dropped it, and forced himself to empty his mind. A sense of utter wrongness played along his nerves, fretting like the discordant notes of some classic industrial symphony. That style of music had enjoyed a resurgence during his first years in the Chamber of Deputies of the Federation legislature, and he had been dragged to a few concerts. It had stuck in his mind, much to his disgust, for it was not music as he had thought of it, but more like noise, and rather unpleasant noise at that. He hated it, as he hated the stool, the smallness of the room in which he sat, and the cramped quarters assigned him as Darkover's Federation Senator.

When Lew Alton had still been Senator, he had had somewhat larger quarters, and a home on Thetis as well. But those days were gone now, and few if any members of the legislature had off-world places unless they were inherited ones. The Office of Finance had imposed strict travel limitations a few years earlier, which restricted the movements of the members. They could go to their home worlds for elections every five Terran years, but Herm never had returned to Darkover. He had not been elected, but instead had been appointed by Regis Hastur, a man he had never actually met, twenty-three years before. He had worked for eight years in the Chamber of Deputies, and when Lew Alton had vacated the Senate seat, he had taken his place.

Policy changes imposed by the Office of Finance, and numerous other dictates over the years, had ultimately left the legislature prisoner to the whims of Premier Sandra Nagy and her Expansionist cronies. Despite its name, the Expansionists were an austere bunch of autocrats, and each year had seen more and more restrictions imposed on everyone except the most favored members of the Party. As he had told his wife once, on a rare occasion when he was moderately certain there were no listening devices nearby, "The Expansionists say there are limited resources in the Federation-and all of them are the rightful property of the Expansionists!" She had not even laughed.

The three-room apartment was a better domicile than most ordinary Terrans possessed, but Herm had grown up in Aldaran Castle, with stone walls around him, and great, roaring hearths sending out gusts of scent-laden sooty, heated air. An odd thing to miss, after more than two decades. But the scentless, stifling atmosphere of the apartment, which was warm all the year round because of the central controls of the building, still made him feel like a trapped animal. There were eight billion people on the planet, and more every year. He had a great longing for space, for stretches of conifers and the smell of mountain balsam, for the cry of the Hellers' hawks, their russet plumage bright against a sky illuminated by a ruddy sun.

It was not simply a nostalgia for unsullied expanses of gleaming snow that stirred him. Even after two decades, he remained uncomfortable with his situation-felt alien. Herm had never felt entirely clean after using a sonic shower, although it removed all the dead skin and oil from his body. Water, like everything else, was rationed and taxed, and he had a deep longing for a great wallow in a tub of steaming water, scented with oil of lavender. A thick towel of Dry Town cotton to dry with, and a robe of felted wool over his body completed the pleasant fantasy. No clammy synthetic on his skin . . .

It made his heart ache to think of those things, and he wondered at himself. He had spent almost half his life off Darkover, and felt he should have accustomed himself to it by now. But if anything, his homesickness grew worse and worse. For a moment he remembered his younger self, a yokel by Federation standards, arriving to represent his world in the lower chamber. He had been awed by the huge buildings, the hives and skyscrapers, the presence of technologies unimaginable on his far-distant world. Despite having grown up with various Terrans who were welcomed at Aldaran Castle, and having a mother who claimed Terra as the planet of her birth, he had quickly realized he was incredibly ignorant. He did not remember much about his mother, for she had died when he was three. And certainly nothing he remembered her saying prepared him for the reality he experienced during his first year in the Chamber of Deputies. She had granted him a strange, unDarkovan name which he understood now was ancient and unusual even by Terran standards, a predisposition toward baldness, and beyond that only distant fragmented memories. Dom Damon Aldaran's wives, all three of them, had perished-his father had been tragically unlucky.

It had been fortunate that Lew was there to help him through those first few years. He had learned how to use the technology, how to access newsfeeds on a computer and communicate with people almost instantly. More importantly, Lew Alton had set him to studying the literature and philosophy of a hundred planets, and the complex history of the Federation itself. At first he had been unsure of the purpose of these efforts, and had only read the texts in order to please the older man. But slowly he had come to understand how uneducated he was for the task he had been chosen to perform. With great difficulty he had started to understand the thinking of the Federation, how it was founded on ancient ideas that had never taken root on Darkover-some of them very good ideas.

But now he knew that these ideals were being abandoned, and that the Federation was moving into an area of military dominance and oppression. It had happened before, in the history of humans, but he wished it was not occurring during his own lifetime. And it was not something he could discuss openly, as had been possible when he first came from Darkover. Like every other person on the planet, he was subject to constant observation. And there was nothing he could do about it, since disabling the spy eyes that watched and listened was a serious offense. He wondered what the average person thought about it or if they thought at all. Likely they did not, hypnotized as they were with mediafeeds and vidrams.

But Herm knew that the situation was bad and getting worse all the time. Trillions of credits were disbursed every year to create new technologies. At the same time, very little was spent on the day-to-day existence of ordinary people, whose lives became ever more difficult. He had tried to understand this phenomenon, but it still made no sense to him, and, like most of his fellow legislators, he was virtually powerless to change it.

He was being morbid. It must just be the strain of recent days. Regis Hastur had never filled his original place in the Chamber of Deputies after Herm had vacated it, and he had not encountered another native of his planet in sixteen years. This rarely weighed on him, but he was so tired now that it seemed a heavy burden.

Of late, sleep had become a rare commodity, as the meetings, both public and private, in the two chambers of the Federation legislature had gone far into what passed for night in this dreadful place. Any of Zandru's frozen hells seemed preferable at that moment. The Senate, his labor of almost sixteen years now, was a hornet's nest stirred with an Expansionist stick, and the Chamber of Deputies was little better. But he had dealt with political crises before without waking up in the middle of the night with his heart trying to hammer its way through his chest.

As much as Herm hated living in the Federation, he actually enjoyed the constant turmoil of political life. Or he had until a few months before, when the Expansionist party had finally achieved a slim majority in both houses, and begun to implement policies he opposed. New taxes had been passed for all member planets of the Federation, to build a fleet of dreadnaughts, great fighting ships, when there was no foe to defend against. Some worlds had protested, and even tried to rebel, and combat troops had been sent in to "keep order." It had gone from being a game at which he excelled, with his natural talent for verbal interplay, and the cunning which had always been his mainstay, to a daily nightmare from which he feared he would never awaken.

Recently the flow of events had disturbed a few of the more moderate Senators in the Expansionist Party itself. With what Herm regarded as enormous courage, these men and women had voted against their own majority on a critical defense bill, effectively destroying it, and bringing both the Senate and the Chamber to an impasse. Pressure had been brought, persuasion had been used, but to no avail. Except for endless conferences, meetings, and some lengthy speeches on the floor, no actual business had been conducted for nearly six weeks now, and it did not appear that any would be in the near future. The leaders of the Expansionists were becoming more and more desperate, and the only good that had come out of the mess was that no more new taxes had been passed in the interim. But no benefit could ultimately come from a paralyzed parliament. A government unable to act could inadvertently do more harm than good.

Herm tried to shake away the dour mood that enveloped his mind, and found himself remembering one of the last conversations he had had with Lew Alton, just before Lew had resigned his office and returned to Darkover. Lucky man. He wasn't balancing his bottom on a stingy stool, trying to make sense out of a hysteria that had grown and grown over the past decade. What had he said? Ah, yes. "There may come a time when the Federation loses its collective mind, Hermes, and when that happens, if it does, I cannot really advise you what to do. But when that day arrives, you will know it in your bones. And then you must decide whether to stay and fight, or run from the fracas. Believe me, it will be evident to your intelligence. Trust your instincts then, young man."

Good advice, and still sound. But things were different now than when Lew had still been Darkover's Senator. Then Herm had not been married-what a singularly foolish thing to have done, to wed a widow from Renney with a small son, Amaury. But he had been hopelessly in love! Now they had their own child, his daughter Terese, a delightful girl of nearly ten. They were the light of his life, and he knew that without the anchor of Kate and the children he would have been even more miserable than he was. He realized he had not thought the matter through thoroughly when he met her, fell totally in love, and married her a month afterward. Certainly he had not considered the problems of a half-Darkovan child reaching an age where threshold sickness and the onset of laran were real concerns. And he had never told Katherine about the peculiar inbred paranormal talents of his people, although he had always intended to . . . someday. The moment just had never seemed right. And what, after all, would he say? "Oh, by the way, Kate, I've been meaning to tell you that I can read the minds of other people."

Herm shuddered at the imagined scene that would certainly follow. No, he had not told her the truth, not clever Herm. He had just gone on, wheeling and dealing, keeping Darkover safe from Federation predators, and put the matter off until another day. A wave of regret and guilt swept through him, and his stomach felt full of angry insects.

After his mother's death, he had became a private child and had grown into a secretive adult, a habit which had stood him in good stead during his years in the Federation. The very walls had ears and eyes, even those in this miserable excuse for a kitchen-the so called FP Station. Well, two counters, a tiny sink, a cool box and heating compartment were nothing like a vast stone chamber with a beehive-shaped oven in one corner, one or two large fireplaces, and a long table where the servants could sit and eat and gossip. The old cook at Aldaran Castle-she was probably dead now-had had a way of fixing water fowl with vegetables that was wonderful, and his mouth watered at the thought of it. He had not tasted fresh meat since he and Katherine had gone to Renney nine years before. Vat-grown protein had no flavor, even if it did nourish his body.

He forced the delightful vision of a plump fowl running with fat and pinkish juices out of his mind and tried to focus on his abrupt arousal. What had brought him out of his desperately needed rest? He had no sense of a dream, so it must have been something else. Herm shivered all over, in spite of the warmth of the room, and watched the flesh crinkle along his forearms. He had not been dreaming at all. No, it was almost certainly an occurrence of the Aldaran Gift, a foresight he would probably wish to avoid, once he remembered what it was. His laran was decent, good enough to catch the occasional thoughts of the men and women he dealt with every day, an advantage he was careful not to display or abuse. He relied much more on his native cunning than on his telepathy-it was a more dependable talent, and less ethically dubious.

Besides, he was a diplomat, not a spy, and just because the Federation kept a watchful eye and ear on his every movement did not seem sufficient reason to imitate them. But he did wonder what the unseen auditors made of his love trysts with Kate. Nothing, most likely, since they must record millions of such incidents every night. Still, the lack of real privacy rankled, the more so because he was sure he was being observed even now. The things that human beings would do in the name of order never failed to astound him.

Now, all he had to do was remember what had awakened him, and get back to sleep. Something was most assuredly up, but it had felt that way for weeks. He had caught the occasional thoughts in the minds of his fellow legislators, and they were deeply perturbed. This was not limited to the opposition either, for he had noticed more than a few Expansionist Senators mentally squirming, their thoughts giving lie to the words issuing from their mouths. Lacking the Alton Gift of forced rapport, which had given his predecessor such an advantage, Herm made do with scraps of unguarded thought, and what he mostly heard was more banal or self-serving than useful.

The halls and conference rooms of the Senate Building were permeated with fear these days, and Herm had observed long-time allies eyeing one another suspiciously. There was good reason to be afraid. Opposition to Expansionist strategies was dangerous, and more than a few Senators had had unexplained accidents or sudden illnesses in the last few years. Trust and the capacity for reasonable compromise, the foundation stones of representative government, had vanished almost completely, replaced by a wariness and paranoia that was chilling to glimpse in the unguarded minds of his fellows. It made the actions of people like Senator Ilmurit appear impossibly brave. She had crossed the aisle with seven other moderates and unwound the tenuously held majority the Expansionists had achieved with such enormous effort, and not a little treachery as well.

His eyes itched furiously, and his muscles twitched. It was infuriating, too, for he knew that he would not have had a vision for any trivial matter. He did not have the Aldaran Gift very strongly, but when it manifested itself, it was always important. Twice in the years he had served as Darkover's Senator it had helped him avoid political traps and betrayals.

He closed his eyes, feeling the tug of exhaustion, and tried to recall the warning that had awakened him. It was muddled, a collection of voices, shouts of distress and words he could barely make out. It took him several minutes of intense concentration to realize that it was not one thing, but two separate events, shuffled together so it was difficult to distinguish between them.

Two women? Yes, that was right. Who? Neither was his Kate, nor the voices of any of the female Senators or Deputies he knew. Then he recognized one, the very familiar voice of Sandra Nagy, the current Premier of the Federation. He had not known it at first because he was accustomed to her usually pleasant alto, the one in which she gave addresses which were broadcast throughout the reaches of the Terran Federation, explaining why taxes would be raised again, or why combat troops had been used against civilian populations.

Herm suddenly realized that he had had no vision, and no dream either, but instead the experience of clairaudience, which was the rarest manifestation of the Aldaran Gift. He had heard the future-if only he could remember the bedamned words! He tensed, knitting his brow fiercely, willing his mind to cough up some clarity and sense. Concentrate on Nagy, he told himself, and ignore the other sounds.

"I cannot permit the functioning of the Federation government to remain at a halt any longer," Herm heard at last. "Since it is clear that the opposition is determined to hold the legislature hostage to their own inexplicable and selfish goals, I have no choice but to dissolve both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies until such time as new elections can be held and order restored."

Herm sat stunned for a moment. When was this going to occur? The Aldaran foresight was never exact, and it rarely offered such useful things as dates or times. He did not doubt the forehearing, however, but could only try to think what it would mean for Darkover.

It was not a complete surprise, for it had always been a possibility, under the constitution of the Federation. No Premier had disbanded the government in more than a century, since before the Terrans had come to Darkover, but he had read the history of such events. What he knew did not reassure him. As often as not, it was a first move to tyranny, oppression, and suffering. And the Federation had already gone a good way in that direction, with their spy eyes in even the meanest domicile, all in the name of security. There was an ever present fear of rebellion which had grown over the past decade until it colored everything. Even those Senators who were reasonable men and women seemed to have caught the contagion. As for the Expansionist members, they drank in their imagined responses to such revolts like fine wine, getting tipsy on vintage visions of retaliation. Sometimes he almost thought they enjoyed their fever dreams of a galaxy-wide apocalypse.

Lew Alton had been right all those years before-the Federation was going to hell in a handcart. The miracle was that it had taken this long. But what should he do now? And what of the other voice, the less distinct one, the unknown woman who had cried in his mind?

Run!

The single word in his mind rang like a great bell, blotting out all other considerations for a moment. Hermes-Gabriel Aldaran was afraid, and he felt no shame in confessing it to himself. He half rose off the uncomfortable stool, then sank back again. There were eyes watching him, and while it might be days or even weeks before any human eyes studied the record of this particular moment, he must be careful not to behave in a manner that would draw attention to his actions. He had Kate and the children to think of.

He went over the remembered words again, feeling more and more frustrated. When was she going to make this devastating announcement? What good did it do him to have foreknowledge if he lacked any clue as to whether the foreseen events would occur tomorrow or next week! Herm made himself consider the immediate situation as calmly and objectively as he was able. A handful of worlds were simmering on the edge of rebellion, and when the Premier disbanded the legislature, at least one of them would use it as an excuse to try to break with the Federation. He understood that, but he could not be sure that Nagy did. Her advisory council was made up almost entirely of the more extreme voices in the Party, those who sincerely believed that they knew better how to run the lives of everyone on Federation planets than their native peoples did themselves.

And what would the dissolution of the legislature mean for the governors, kings, and other ruling bodies of the member planets? Without representation, they would lose their voices completely. Would she suspend the Federation Constitution and institute martial law? Herm rubbed the short beard around his mouth reflectively. No, she would not go that far-at least not immediately. Instead, she and her cronies would wait for some planet to rebel, and use that as an excuse to declare a state of emergency. This was the logical course.

Had troops already been deployed to those planets regarded as either dangerous or potentially disloyal? Herm did not know, and there was no way he could gain access to the files where such information might exist without arousing immediate suspicion. He had better assume that portions of the Fleet were in place or on their way, just to be safe. Hadn't there been something about some war games in the Castor sector? He scratched his head and flogged his weary brain to remember. Yes, it was Castor. There were two worlds there which he would focus on, if he were some Expansionist strategist looking for trouble.

Satisfied for the instant that he had theorized as well as he could without any real information, Herm tried to analyze his own situation. Where did he stand? He was the unaligned Senator of a Protected Planet, and not an overt threat to anyone. He had been careful to cultivate an unthreatening personality, and this had served him well enough during his years. But Herm knew the tenor of the Expansionist mind well enough to realize that if you were not their ally, you were regarded as an enemy. He had seen some of his friends in the Senate destroyed by scandals that he knew were trumped up, and he did not want to wait around to find out if he would become the latest victim. That was unlikely, because Darkover was not an important world. But he had Kate and the children to consider, not just his own Aldaran hide. And once the Senate was disbanded, he would no longer have the immunity of his office to protect him and his family. He could be arrested then, or worse. If only he were not so weary and was able to think with a clear head. Instead, he was just plain scared, and was attempting to resist the impulse to flee.

Herm decided that he had to try to discover when Sandra Nagy was actually going to drop her political bomb, before he did anything more. He rose from the stool and padded across to the household terminal, knowing that at least this action would not arouse much attention from the spy eyes in the walls. He was in the habit of accessing the newsfeeds several times a day, and even at night if he couldn't sleep, as he was now. Indeed, it was such a typical thing that it might allay suspicion rather than otherwise.

He pressed his hand against the glassy surface of the comlink and waited. For several seconds nothing happened and his heart began to beat a bit faster, fearing that he was too late, and that events had rushed beyond his control, that he would be denied access and a goon squad of Expansionist bully boys would come knocking at the door. Then he scolded himself silently. The system had been sluggish for weeks now, due to power blackouts that occasionally blinded half a continent for hours at a time.

Everything on the planet-from voting to food ordering-was dependent on these electronic links. But the shortsightedness of the Expansionists had blocked the funds for improvements, and now the system was beginning to fall apart. It was, Herm knew, symptomatic of all that was wrong in the Federation. Infrastructures were decaying, and no one was able to get a bill through the legislature to do anything about it. The population kept increasing, but the services that supported the people were deteriorating, because the funds needed were being spent on armaments, on the construction of military ships and the training of troops. It was folly, and he knew that he was not the only one who was aware of it. Unfortunately, no one wanted to hear his voice, or those of others who suggested that spending on defense over basic needs was unsupportable.

He thought about his studies of history. However reluctantly they had begun, they were now almost an obsession. His love of history was one of the few pleasures outside his family that he had, an escape from the dreadful present he was living through. For some reason he found himself remembering the tale of a great empire which had existed on Terra just before the age of space travel, a nation that covered most of what had been called Asia and Europe. For half a century it had devoted itself to preparations for a war that never came, and finally it had collapsed into bits and pieces, bankrupted by its own fear. Perhaps the Expansionist movement would run the same course. This thought gave him cold comfort while he waited.

At last the terminal blinked into life. He scrolled the most recent newsfeeds, scanning the words rapidly, looking for any clues that might tell him how much time he had. He ignored reports of food shortages, yet another water riot in the Indonesian islands, the arrival of the Governor of Tau Ceti III for a state visit, and several other items. Ah, here it was, a terse tidbit buried at the end of the most recent feed. The Premier had announced a major speech before the combined houses three days hence. So, that was how much time he had to get as far away as he could. Not much, but enough. It felt right, down in his bones, just as Lew had said it would. And clever as he was, he had always kept a means of escape open.

For an instant all he could think of was that he was, at last, going to go back to Darkover-immediately. A wave of relief made him grin at the flashing screen. But, in all likelihood, he was not coming back, and that presented a fresh set of problems. He must take Kate and the children with him. That was simple enough, except that she would have questions about why they were abandoning their home. And he could hardly tell her the truth, for that would alert the monitors in the walls.

Hermes sighed. Life as a bachelor had been much simpler, but less satisfactory. Kate was an intelligent woman; she would just have to trust him because she would know he was thinking of their best interests. He spent a futile moment worrying over uprooting the children, and then forced it out of his mind. They were young and adaptable, and it was more important to keep them from harm than to worry about anything else. Later, out of reach of constant surveillance, he would explain things. It was not something he looked forward to. She would tear a strip off his hide for not finding some way of telling her earlier and it was probably less than he deserved.

With a grunt, he keyed a program into the comlink, one that had been placed there years before. A message popped up on the screen, with all the correct codes, telling him to return to Darkover immediately. He suppressed a grin, knowing it for a clever fraud, and hoping that the information ferrets had never discovered its existence. It certainly looked official, and if no one examined it too closely, it should allow him to remove himself and his family from danger.

Herm looked at it, tried to appear startled, scratching his head fretfully and muttered. Then, with a pleasure he had difficulty concealing, he keyed in another program. There was a further delay, and sweat puddled under his arms and ran down his sides. Then, almost magicially, he found an open passage across Federation space booked on the first departing ship, in perfect order. It allowed him to use his privileged position to usurp the first available cabin, in the first class section of a Big Ship.

He derived a grim pleasure from using his trapdoor. These days, with the Expansionist restrictions, it sometimes took months to book passage, unless one had friends in the right places. But as a Senator he could still pull rank, even though he knew it meant that he would almost certainly disrupt some complete stranger's travel plans. He calmed his conscience by remembering it would likely discomfort some Expansionist party loyalist, since these were the people permitted travel for the most part.

The link scrolled and made a faint and not unpleasant humming noise as it worked. After several minutes a display came up, a routing with a transfer to Vainwal. The system accepted it without query, and he had the booking arranged. They had six hours to get their things together and go to the port. It was not a great deal of time, and he prayed that Katherine would not argue too much.

He allowed his shoulders to slump a little, exhausted from the tension of his efforts. As he relaxed, he heard the voices in his dream return, and realized that he still had not thought about the second one, the unknown voice, fainter than Nagy's. Frustrated, he struggled to hear it. Herm forced himself to take several deep breaths, to create some patience when what he most desired was action. He had only deciphered half the puzzle, and the second voice was likely as important as the first. He must not be hasty. It was hard. Focus, particularly when he was tired, was a difficult discipline. He shut his eyes and balled his fists, willing his mind to bring back the faint, distant words. There was nothing for a moment, and then a flood of images danced across his eyelids. He saw sheets of paper with neat lines on them, and then a bottle of ink fell over, spreading across the pages. Something has happened to Regis!

The words made him tremble. Herm forced himself to remain seated for a minute, calming his mind as well as he could. Perhaps his false message from Darkover was truer than he had imagined. He had no idea whose voice it was, reaching through time and space, across untold lightyears, to find him in dream and rouse him to action. He was chilled to the bone, and the sweat on his chest was cold on his skin.

Inertia seemed to paralyze him briefly, as his mind spun in tangles of fruitless speculation. Then he made himself stand up, noticing that his knees protested a little, and cross the common room. He poured himself another half glass of juice, then put the container back into the cool box. He placed his empty glass in the rack for the sterilizer, took a deep breath, and prepared to go wake up Katherine. He would have to rush her, not give her time to think, to ask questions-or else abandon her and the children, and that was unthinkable. If only he was not so weary!

1.

Marguerida Alton-Hastur sat at her desk and stared out the narrow window, unsettled for no reason she could put a name to. A glorious early autumn sky, with several interesting cloud shapes in it, filled the opening. She decided one resembled a camel, an animal that had never existed on Darkover and was now alive only in a few wildlife refuges, and remembered how much fun she had had when the children were little, trying to decide what clouds looked like. Once, several clouds had seemed to her gaze to be a pod of delfins frolicking in the seas of Thetis, the planet on which she had grown up. Marguerida had been unable to explain her sudden flood of tears, nor the nature of the images. Her children had never seen the sea, let alone bathed in it, and they could not understand her aching desire for warm oceans and balmy breezes. Funny-she had not thought of that day in ages. She must be getting old, wallowing in memories.

The children were all much too grown up for cloud-gazing now, even Yllana, the youngest, at eleven, and she rather missed the innocent game. Last Midsummer, Domenic, her eldest, had been declared his father's heir designate, despite the very vocal protects of Javanne Hastur, her difficult mother-in-law. It hardly seemed possible-the time had passed so quickly. Before long she might become a mother-in-law herself, and then a grandmother! She hoped that she would like her yet undiscovered daughter-in-law more than Javanne liked her, that she would be kinder, or at least more polite. But not too soon, she whispered to herself. As difficult as being a parent had turned out to be, she was in no hurry to have her children leave her.

She looked around the small office she kept in her suite of rooms in Comyn Castle. The hearth was ablaze, and the cozy room was fragrant with the smell of burning balsam. The paneled walls shone, reflecting the dancing light from the fire, and the colors in the pattern of the rug on the stone floor pleased her. The tang of fall penetrated even through the thick walls of Comyn Castle, a fresh smell that never failed to liven her mind. It had taken a long while to get used to the weather on Darkover, for Thetis was almost an endless summer. But now she actually looked forward to changing seasons and the festivals which punctuated them.

From the next room, she could hear the delightful tinkle of a clavier, where Ida Davidson was giving Yllana her music lessons. She smiled at the sound. It was not a syntheclavier of the sort which Ida had used when Marguerida had lived in her house during her years at the University. Such a device was prohibited on Darkover, since it used the advanced technologies of the Federation. Instead, it was a reasonable imitation of the noble ancestor of that instrument, crafted wholly on Darkover, of native woods and rare Darkovan metals, made from drawings Marguerida had obtained with great difficulty from the University archives. There had never been such a keyboard instrument on Darkover before, but now, after the struggle to create the first one, there were six in Thendara. Members of the Musicians Guild were writing music specifically for them. Yllana was not playing any of these home-grown compositions, but one of the Klieg Variations from the twenty-fourth century-formal, structured and a challenge for ten small fingers.

There was nothing whatever to disturb the serenity of the moment, as a speedy mental sweep of Comyn Castle assured her. The Alton Gift, which she had resented so bitterly when she first discovered she had it, had turned out to have its uses, one of which was the ability to scan the environment around her. Perhaps she was just being anxious for no reason. It had been a troubling year, with a summer that was the warmest in recent memory. The farmers had fretted over the possibility of drought, and the fire danger in the hills had been very great. There had been disturbances of another kind as well-some small riots in the markets of Thendara and reports of an uprising in Shainsa in the Dry Towns. But the rains had come in from the west at last, the balmy, near-sixty degree temperatures had vanished, and there had not been any outbreak of large fires.

She really must get down to work! This woolgathering was wasting valuable time, and her time was at a premium just now. Marguerida looked down at the stack of pages in front of her. They were staff sheets, covered with musical notation and accompanying lyrics. After nearly two decades of doubt and hesitation, she had finally succumbed to her great, secret ambition and written an opera. It had taken all of her nerve and a great deal of encouragement from Ida to get started. But once she began, it had been nearly impossible to stop. Mikhail Hastur, her beloved companion and husband of nearly sixteen years, had complained that her composing was a greater rival than any living man could be, and Marguerida knew he was only half joking.

Writing the music had been fairly easy, but finding the time-the peace and quiet to do so-had been difficult. She had a great many duties, as wife of the heir designate to Regis Hastur, and the mother of three children. Somewhat reluctantly, Marguerida had also taken over some of the task of running Comyn Castle from Lady Linnea Storn-Lanart, Regis' consort. In the years since she had been married to Mikhail Hastur, she had done so many things she had never imagined doing when she had been a young career academic. Foremost among these things, she had learned how to manage her unique and potentially dangerous laran talents, guided by the Keeper Istvana Ridenow. Her friend and confidant had come to Thendara from Neskaya to help her and Mikhail right after they were married, to train them and teach them. Istvana had remained in the city for eleven years, and they had been wonderful ones for Marguerida. But now she was back in her own Tower, pursuing her own calling, and Marguerida still had to work hard at not missing her.

Reflecting for a moment on years past, she decided she had not done so badly in facing her challenges. She had read ancient texts written in the rounded alphabet of Darkover with one hand while she cradled a baby at the breast with the other. She had learned to sit through Comyn Council meetings without losing her fearsome temper, even in the presence of her mother-in-law, Javanne Hastur, who remained an enduring thorn in her side. The shadow matrix which was blazed upon her left hand, the thing she had wrested from a Tower in the overworld, still remained something of an enigma, but she had found ways to control it so that she was no longer afraid of it. It remained beyond the considerable knowledge that had been amassed over the centuries by the leroni of Darkover, a thing which was both real and unreal at the same time. She could heal with it, and she could kill as well, and coming to grips with both extremes had been very difficult. The years had been hard, but she had accomplished things she had never dreamed of, and she had a deep sense of satisfaction in that.

During those years of study and motherhood, however, there had been no time for the music which had once defined her life and still remained her ruling passion. Instead, she had channeled her considerable energies into less personal efforts. With the help of Thendara House, the Renunciate center in the city, she had founded a small printing house, and several schools for the children of tradesmen and crafts people. She had helped the Musicians Guild get permission to erect a new performance hall much larger than anything which had existed before, and encouraged the preservation of the fine musical tradition of Darkover in any way she could.

Marguerida's choices had been neither altruistic nor uncomplicated. When she had returned to the world of her birth over sixteen years before, there had been a great vogue for everything concerning the Terran Federation, a condition which perturbed not only the more conservative rulers of several Domains, but bothered the craftsmen and tradesmen as well. They feared their way of life would be lost in a flood of Terran technology, and had gone so far as to petition Regis Hastur to restore the Comyn Council, which had been disbanded two decades earlier. Their demand had been unprecedented in the history of Darkover, and Regis had listened to their arguments, and restored the Council. This had kept Darkover on a path that satisfied most of its inhabitants.

But a complete return to the pre-Federation past was impossible, although there were a few members on the Council who sincerely believed otherwise. Javanne, for instance, seemed consumed with the idea that if everyone would just do things as she wished, and make a real effort, then somehow the glories of an earlier time would reappear, and the Federation would cease to trouble their minds. Francisco Ridenow, the head of the Ridenow Domain, was almost as bad.

Marguerida understood both her mother-in-law's curious nostalgia for a time which she had never actually known-for the Terrans had arrived four decades before Javanne had been born-and her almost atavistic fear of change. She also knew it was much too late to turn back, and that Darkover needed increased knowledge, not unlettered ignorance, in order to prosper. The Federation was not going to go away just because Javanne Hastur wished it to, although there seemed no way to make the woman grasp this fact.

The space madness which had possessed the previous generation of youngsters had faded, however, and the populace had returned to their normal pursuits, with, Marguerida was sure, a silent sigh of relief. The number of young men and women who wanted to learn the intricacies of Federation technologies had diminished, too, and while there was always a pool of adolescents eager to obtain employment at Federation Headquarters, they were principally the offspring of Federation people who had married Darkovans.

The Federation itself was responsible for this. The political body she had been familiar with during her years at University was gone, replaced by a tangle of bureaucracies, each jealously guarding its own privileges, and unwilling to welcome newcomers into its ranks. This reorganization, which had taken place twelve years before, had brought them Lyle Belfontaine, the Station Chief at Headquarters. She had never actually met him, but her father had, and Lew Alton had given her a very poor impression of the man. Belfontaine had made it quite clear that he regarded the Darkovans as backward and useless. The organizational shift in the Federation had made him the most powerful Terran on the planet, superseding even the Planetary Administrator, who, while he still retained his position, had no voice in the actual running of things. Belfontaine had closed the old John Reade Orphanage, out of pique at a decision of Regis', and then closed down the Medical Center to any except Federation employees as well.

Much of this had passed by Marguerida unnoticed until recently. She had been much too busy rearing her three children, and studying with Istvana. She had found an unexpected kind of satisfaction in both activities, and had been happily willing to leave larger matters to her father, Lew, to Regis, and to Mikhail. It had been enough, with her other more public activities. But now, finding that she could compose music with the same hand that was her curse and her blessing, she had discovered a depth of pleasure that nothing else afforded her.

She had never wanted to participate in the administration of Comyn Castle, but Lady Linnea had persuaded her that she must. Eventually it would become her job, in some misty future time when Regis Hastur had gone to his rest, or his consort was too old to continue. The idea remained unreal in her mind, as if she could not bear the idea of their inevitable ends.

She had tackled her new duties as she had approached everything else in her life-by learning everything she could as quickly as possible. It had helped that she had spent ten years assisting Ivor Davidson, her long-dead mentor, on his journeys around the backwaters of the Federation in search of indigenous music history and tradition. More, Marguerida had the advantage of knowing Comyn Castle in a way that no one else did. She had ancient memories of the building imprinted in her mind, a leftover from her overshadowing by the long dead Keeper, Ashara Alton. These ancient memories had cursed her youth and adolescence, appearing in dreams and nightmares. Only her return to the planet of her birth had released her from the torment of inexplicable thoughts and images, although for a time it had given her more problems than she had ever imagined. She had nearly died from adult-onset threshold sickness-an experience Marguerida had mercifully almost forgotten.

Ashara had been present at the construction of Comyn Castle, and after she had died, her shade had remained present in the now ruined Old Tower that stood on one side of the castle. So there were forgotten byways and unremembered rooms and passages that were as familiar to Marguerida as her own hand. It was a disquieting knowledge, one that she had to take pains to conceal because it made the servants uneasy. Dealing with them had been a real challenge, since she was more accustomed to doing things herself than to ordering them done. And the actual administration of Comyn Castle was a much larger project than keeping travel papers and baggage in order. In many ways the building was a self-contained small town, with its own brewery, bakery, and even a small weaving loft. It was always stocked as if for a siege, and one of her duties had been to keep it ready for any eventuality.

Although she had been born on Darkover forty-two years before, Marguerida had lived half of her life off that world, and part of her still felt like an interloper. Her father said he often had the same feeling, and sharing her sense of alienation with him was a comfort to her. She had been estranged from him for all her years at University, but when they had met again, soon after her return to Darkover, Marguerida had found him changed. Now she could not think of life without him-his ironic sense of humor, his profound insights, and most of all, his steady affection for her, for Mikhail, and for his grandchildren. He was no longer the drunken, tortured man who raged in the night, and even the death of his wife, Diotima Ridenow, ten years ago had miraculously not returned him to that earlier state.

But despite the understanding presence of her father, Marguerida's sense of being a stranger had never entirely gone away. Part of this was the result of her difficult relationship with Javanne Hastur. Mikhail's mother had never really accepted her into the family, although his father, Dom Gabriel had finally broken down and welcomed her with genuine affection. Javanne always managed to convey to Marguerida a sense that there was something wrong with her, and with Domenic, her oldest child, whose conception had occurred under such unusual circumstances-during her journey back through time to the Ages of Chaos. She might even be correct about Nico, although Marguerida would have bitten her tongue rather than admit it. He was an odd lad, older than his years, self-contained and remote. But the difference ran deeper than that, and Marguerida knew it. There was something just a bit eerie about her oldest child, a quality of stillness that made it seem as if he were listening to some distant voice. Maybe he was, or perhaps, as Dom Danilo Syrtis-Ardais had once suggested, half seriously, he was the reincarnation of Varzil Ridenow. She rather hoped he was not, for her single encounter with that long dead laranzu had not left her with any desire to meet him in another form, and certainly not as her son.

She tried to accept and come to terms with her mother-in-law's dislike of her. After all, she was Regis' older sister and part of the family. She took some comfort in the fact that Javanne treated Gisela Aldaran, now the wife of Mikhail's older brother Rafael, with even less courtesy. It was about the only thing she and Giz had in common, for she had never managed to become friends with her sister-in-law, and having her in Comyn Castle all the time could, at times, be a real trial. Marguerida had done her best to reconcile with her sister-in-law, taking an interest in Gisela's researches into the geneologies of the Domain families, and also into the game of chess. She had even managed to procure a three-dimensional chess set as a gift for her one Midwinter, and the other woman had unbent for a brief time as a result.

But Gisela remained an aloof and disruptive presence in Comyn Castle, which already housed enough strong personalities to overwhelm anyone. She understood some of Giz's melancholy and sizzling rage. The woman had set her sights on Mikhail when she was only an adolescent, and had failed to achieve her ambition. That was hard enough. But she and Rafael lived in the Castle, and had to see both Mikhail and Marguerida almost every day. She was a kind of gentle hostage for the good behavior of the Aldaran Domain. Regis had never come to trust Dom Damon Aldaran entirely, and as difficult as having Gisela underfoot might be, it gave him a lever to hold the old man in check. Marguerida managed to forgive her difficult relative much of her ill-temper, recognizing in her both intelligence and ambition, and only wanted to strangle her once a tenday.

Her mother-in-law was another matter entirely, and even though she was not present at Comyn Castle very often, the thought of the woman always roused her to rage. Javanne doted on Roderick and Yllana, Marguerida and Mikhail's younger offspring, but she treated Domenic as if he were invisible, or worse, as if he smelled bad. And Nico was such a good lad, so serious and thoughtful, unlike Rory, who was born for mischief. Yllana was still too young to be fully formed, but was of reasonable intelligence, clever with her fingers, quick-tongued like her mother, and cautious like Mikhail.

Grimly, she pushed aside these distracting thoughts. It was time to begin a clean copy of the entire manuscript, and while she could have given the job to someone from the Musicians Guild, Marguerida wanted to do it herself. She had managed to sort out the usual morning's work quickly-the menu for the evening meal with dishes that would not unsettle Regis' now finicky stomach, an ingress of mice into one of the flour bins in the kitchens, and several other minor matters. It was a normal day, full of trivial problems.

For the present, the children were occupied, although there was always the chance that her difficult foster daughter, Alanna Alar, would interrupt her. Nico, her secret favorite, was doing his Guard duty, and Rory was scrubbing a wall he had adorned with chalks and paints a few days before. It was rather a nice mural, and she was sorry to tell him to destroy it, but she could not allow her troublesome middle child to get in the habit of defacing walls. It was bad enough that he gorged himself to illness on stolen tarts from the kitchens, showing every sign of taking up thievery as a fulltime occupation. Marguerida wondered if some of that tremendous energy might not be channeled into art, at which Rory seemed quite talented. But this was an idle thought, for in a few months he would go to Arilinn for his first training, and after that, the Cadet Guards would be his future. His life was laid out for him, as much as it could be with things so uncertain.

Marguerida's years on Darkover had not been untroubled, and the Terran Federation had been at the root of most of it. In the prior two decades the Federation had increased pressure on Darkover to give up its Protected status and join the Federation as a full member. This would have meant paying taxes into the coffers of the ever more rapacious Terrans, as well as making drastic alterations in the way in which Darkover was governed. When a planet became a part of the Federation, it became subject to the Federation, and essentially lost autonomy over its own resources and governance. For that reason, Lew had strongly advised against surrendering their Protected status, a choice which had allied him with Javanne Hastur. It had not particularly pleased Javanne to have Lew agree with her, since her youthful dislike of him had now hardened into something approaching fanatic hatred, but at least it had ended the rancorous argument between them during Comyn Council meetings. Council meeting "debates" tended to be emotionally heated and often vindictive, leaving Marguerida with a profound desire for peace and quiet. But as Lew calmly told her, there was no peace on Darkover because if everyone agreed, it would be unnatural.

Instead of starting to work, Marguenda found her thoughts drifting toward the problems the Federation continued to create for Darkover. It was very annoying, really, not to be able to concentrate. Then she paused, frowned down at the music, and then gazed at the fire in the hearth. She had become extremely disciplined while she studied with Istvana Ridenow, and it was unusual for her mind to go off on tangents like this. Perhaps there was some reason for her fussing.

Marguerida kept abreast of the deteriorating relationship between Darkover and the Federation, even though she tried to remain in the background as much as possible. One of the things which Javanne disliked about her was that she was in a position to influence the views of her husband, her father, and others in Comyn Castle. Javanne assumed she would interfere, because that was just what Javanne would have done, given the same opportunity. To counteract these suspicions, Marguerida had done her best to pretend she was a proper Darkovan woman, interested in domestic matters, not those of state. She readily admitted she had not succeeded very well. She was too strong-minded to sit quietly during Council meetings, even though she promised herself each time that she would.

It was funny, really. She and Javanne were very similar in disposition, and while Marguerida had the advantage of a Federation education, her mother-in-law knew Darkover down into her aging bones. So, they disagreed on almost everything, often painfully. Javanne just could not understand that the Federation had to be dealt with; it could not be wished away or sent off.

Even when they were in agreement, as when the Station Chief had installed some media screens in taverns in the Trade City, and Regis had ordered them dismantled since they violated the treaty with the Federation, it was grudging and unpleasant. Something niggled in Marguerida's mind as she thought about this incident and she wondered if Belfontaine was about to attempt another intrusion into the Darkovan way of life. There was no information she had to suggest such a thing, but sometimes her unconscious mind seemed much more canny than her waking mind.

Of course, there were those odd disturbances this past summer. A small riot in the Horse Market, and all manner of rumors, which had come and gone like the clouds across the sky. It had been a summer fever, and the usually peaceable populace of the city had turned ugly and resentful for a brief time. But why should that trouble her just now, when she had a few uninterrupted hours to work? She felt a frisson of unease, not the first since she had sat down, she realized.

Something was troubling Marguerida, and it was not the Federation or her children, or Mikhail or anything she could put her finger on. She had just the hint of a headache, and her belly was queasy, almost as if she were pregnant again. Since she knew this was not the case, she could not account for the unease, unless she was coming down with some medical complaint. She dismissed the idea abruptly and turned again to the work on the desk.

She really must bear down and focus. Marguerida had a self-imposed deadline to meet. In three weeks it would be Regis' birthday, and it had become the custom to present an evening's entertainment of music for the occasion. She planned to premiere her opera then, since the subject was the legend of Hastur and Cassilda, the legendary forbears of his house, as a gift for him. It was fortunate that an increase in the number of musicians coming to the Castle was a perfectly normal part of the preparations for the event, and more fortunate yet that the singers and players of instruments regarded Marguerida as an ex officio member of their Guild. Thus far, the whole project had remained a secret from Regis, although she was sure he suspected something was going on. In a castle containing many varied telepaths, it was difficult, but not impossible, to plan a surprise.

Marguerida closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Once again she let the Alton Gift reach out, seeking the source of her unease. She had discovered this particular feature of her Gift years before, in a long-destroyed keep, in the distant past, where her life had changed forever. Nothing seemed to be wrong, so she decided she was just being foolish, shrugged her shoulders, opened her eyes, and picked up a pen.

Dipping it into the inkwell, she started to copy the first page. Darkovan musical notation was unlike the form she had learned at University, but after all this time, it was quite familiar to her, and easy to do. Yes, she had been right to do this herself-there was a place on the page where it was unclear what she had intended. Hardly surprising, since she had edited the original half a dozen times. She hummed the notes to herself, vocalized a stanza softly, and made the necessary corrections.

After half an hour, Marguerida had made clean copies of four pages, when a shaft of ruddy sunlight came through the narrow window, brightening the desk and making her blink. She got up to shut out the blinding light, but instead of pulling the curtains, she stood for a moment, looking out. Her ivory wool gown fell around her still slender body in comforting folds, and the apron she had donned to prevent ink stains was crisp over her waist. There was a brisk breeze snapping the pennons on the opposite roof, and the smell of autumn was everywhere. On any other occasion, she would have been out riding with her groom and two Guardsmen, chafing about having the escort, but enjoying the freshness of the air. Her beloved mare, Dorilys, was eighteen now, and feeble, so she rode one of her several foals, Dyania, a frisky, pewter-gray mare with a white star on her chest. It was hard to spend such a fine day indoors, and she turned back toward the desk with enormous reluctance.

Yllana's playing had ceased, and it was very quiet as she sat down once again. Once more she had a stab of unease, but tried to ignore it. Perhaps she was just anxious about the opera. Well, it was more of an oratorio, since there would be neither sets nor costumes. Marguerida very much wanted those, and a public performance of the work as well, in the newly built Music Hall on the other side of Thendara. But in her position it was probably not a good idea. Javanne Hastur and some of the other, more conservative members of the Domains, would likely think that it was unseemly for her to compose something to be publicly performed, as if she were a common musician and not the wife of Mikhail Hastur. There was nothing she could do about the animosity of Javanne except, she hoped, to outlive the woman. That might be a long time coming, since the Hasturs were famous for their longevity. It would be decades before Mikhail became ruler of their world, if he ever actually did. As things presently stood, he was Regis' right-hand man, and Lew Alton was his left, with Danilo Syrtis Ardais, as always, guarding his back.